


Face down in the water

by Anonymous



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dissociation, F/M, Kink Meme, No one consents to what is happening including the person doing it, Non-Consensual Spanking, Nudity, Porn with Feelings, Spanking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unresolved Sexual Tension, angry conversation, followed by conversation, minor self injury, no one here is a licensed therapist, not really porn more like violence and arguments with feelings, spoilers for episode 93
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:55:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22550599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Caleb is angry about Nott’s proposal to the hag.A discussion they’ve put off too long becomes a row that escalates.Catharsis leads to an uncomfortable conversation.
Relationships: Nott & Caleb Widogast, Nott/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 3
Kudos: 62
Collections: Anonymous





	Face down in the water

**Author's Note:**

> kink meme fill 
> 
> I just installed a new refrigerator in my garage to hold all of these dead doves. The only dove still flying is the one where we don’t pretend that someone somehow benefited from what happened, and it isn’t entirely clear that it’s not just falling to the ground.
> 
> Extra warnings not in the tags:  
> Naked woman, clothed man; non-con spanking but the person not consenting swaps halfway through; drowning imagery (no choking/holding under water or anything like that); unresolved literally everything; probably not even enough sexual content to get off on, but enough to leave you feeling dirty

Back at the Xhorhaus, Caleb resigns himself to the idea that he needs to talk to Nott. The problem is that he can’t find her anywhere. She isn’t in her room, or the study, or his room, not with Jester and Beau, or Yasha, or even with Fjord or Caduceus. Not in the kitchen, or as might befit her these days, the war room.

He almost doesn’t go down to the hot tub. If she wants to be left alone, he can do that for a little while at least, but capable as she is, her unexplained absence is morphing into anxiety in his belly. He’s no longer sure what’s safe to ignore, after her and Beau seemed to descend so far in so short a space of time.

And he’s angry with her. He knows why she’s avoiding him - because Caleb and Nott don’t fight, and it had seemed on the way back, like they might. So he stalks around looking for her like an unkind shadow, and he can’t make himself leave well enough alone.

When he gets below the level of the floor and can look into the room, the anxiety grips his chest and his heart plummets so suddenly that he looses the few seconds it takes for him to reach the bottom of the stairs and cross to the tub.

She’s naked, face down, floating, her hair suspended in the water around her, totally still, on the far side of the tub.

He’s up to his waist before he knows what he’s doing, and forces his way through the water. She seems to be movingin response to the disturbance, but he grabs the sides of her face and lifts it from the water before she can go anywhere.

Nott comes up easily, though he gives her no choice, and takes a deep, gasping breath. She tries to jerk away from him automatically and succeeds, slipping from his grasp and submerging herself up to the neck in the water, panting and panicked.

He stands there dumbfounded, a few strands of her hair clinging to his fingers. “Are you alright? What the fuck?” He demands of her. His heart is racing, pulse jumping in his neck and pounding in his ears and sending dark spots through his vision.

She shrinks back from him, eyes cast down to the water, but her voice is ragged and angry. “I’m fine!” 

“Nott?!” He gestures widely, angrily, and his hand hits water. It occurs to him suddenly that he’s carrying both books, and he jerks the harnesses up away from the water and begins to struggle out of them, tossing both as far away from the tub as he can manage. “What the hell were you doing?!”

Caleb knows he’s shouting, and he knows he should be asking what happened, if she’s okay. If she wants to talk, about what happened, about what she did and how she’s feeling, and about her body and the spell and her life. But in his head, another voice has far less sympathy, and it’s shouting different demands at her instead.

Without saying anything, she tries to move past him. He follows the direction she’s going with his eyes and spots her clothes piled by the side of the tub, her flask placed neatly on top of them. He grabs her arm as she goes by and tugs her back.

“Nothing!” She snaps at him. It’s hard to tell if she’s been crying, with all the water, but up close, her eyes look swollen.

“Nothing?” He’s holding her arm too tightly, he knows. Probably if she wanted to escape him, she could do it, especially wet, and he could do nothing to stop her. He loosens his grip, taking her appearance in. Her shoulders, arms and chest are all covered in scratches, like she’s been hugging and clawing at herself. “Were you trying to fucking drown yourself?!”

“No. Leave me alone. I need a drink,” she huffs, reigning back her anger, but only barely.

“No, you do not need a drink, Nott!” He hauls her back to the edge furthest from the flask, pushing himself up to sit on the side and dragging her up with him, shoving aside soap and other bathroom clutter. She kicks and splashes at him, but doesn’t break free, incensed that he would dare to move her around like this more than she is unwilling to go. “Why don’t we try talking sober for once?”

“Fuck you!” Now she is angry, and, he remembers as he manhandles her, naked. He almost lets her go, but she isn’t trying to leave, just to punish him as she thumps his chest. “I don’t wanna hear it!”

He presses her down onto her front across his knees, trying to get her fists away from his face, and tells the back of her head, “Maybe you need to hear it! What the fuck is going on with you that you want to start a  war ?! We’ve been working to end it for  _months_!”

“ _You_ have!” She spits, craning her neck to glare at him, and the viciousness in her face briefly terrifies him. “You care about it. I’ve just been trying to get you fuckers through this shit alive, and come back home with my family.”

“Your family who would have to live in a war zone!” He manages to control his voice finally, now that he’s managed to impose control over Nott. Later he’ll add this to the list of things he hates about himself. “Innocent people, Nott, you don’t care about them?”

“No, I  don’t ,” she says forcefully, and he believes her. “Who the fuck are we to be holding peace talks, anyway? I’m supposed to be a housewife. You’re one old book away from trying to take over the world. Beau is a fucking mess-“

“She would have destroyed herself for you.” Nott’s angry ranting hurts, but Caleb knows his calm disappointment hurts worse, and Nott shows it.

“Fine! Let me have it! Tell me how fucking selfish I am! You fucking coward!” She elbows him hard in the ribs. “I’m so fucking sick-“

Caleb reaches out with the hand that isn’t pinning her, and grabs for whatever is in range, a back massager with a long handle, a weird knobby brush, and a flat back. He brings the flat side down hard on her ass, and knocks the wind out of both of them.

There’s a ringing silence after the smack. Just heavy breathing, the movement of water, a sudden absence of shouting.

He drops the back massager and it clatters off the edge of the tub and into the water. Nott is lying across his lap, every muscle in her body tense, face pressed against his thigh, breasts hanging between his legs. A dark oval across her wet backside begins to swell as proof that Caleb hadn’t imagined what he’d just done.

He lifts his hand off Nott’s back, releasing her, but she doesn’t move.

“Nott... I...” Caleb’s voice fails him. He’s sorry, that he did it, and sorry that he enjoyed it, for a moment. “...Nott?”

He waits for her to speak, but she doesn’t. The silence stretches, the smack lingering long past its echo in the stone chamber.

Nott finally moves, not to look at him, or say anything. She pushes back, the side facing into the tub dipping into the water, as though she means to swim away and hide under water. Instead, she gropes around for a few seconds, and then rearranges herself across his legs, all the while not looking at him. She holds out the dripping back massager behind her, the hand holding it resting in the small of her back.

“I-“ Caleb flounders again for the apology, but his voice catches again. He doesn’t know what to say or how. 

Nott stays silent, turning her face away and pressing it harder against his soaking leg. She taps her own back with the massager, and then pokes at him blindly with it.

He takes it, still bewildered, and because it’s the only course of action he can infer from what she’s just done, he hits her with it again.

She barely gasps, even though the strike overlaps the last, and sounds painfully loud in the echoing stone basement.

_What am I doing what am I doing what am I -_ The anger has drained totally out of Caleb, leaving only panic and anxiety and a familiar pang of guilt to fight it out in his chest. His heart is still racing. He puts his empty hand between her shoulders, like that might stop it from suddenly, uncontrollably shaking.

“Nott?” He whispers. Pleads. He doesn’t dare call her Veth.

“...Keep going.”

Caleb waits for her to say something else, to move, but she doesn’t. He wipes his eyes on the back of his damp sleeve, and smacks her hard on the top of her thighs.

She jerks in his lap, but nothing more. As he’s raising the massager again, she carefully arranges her legs so as to not touch the water, like they’re sharing a bed roll on wet ground and nothing more.

He hits the first place he’d struck her again, and again, and each time she reacts, butonly barely. In another life, Bren had tortured plenty of people, and Caleb knows he’s hurting her. It had felt good then, to break someone. He’d been angry at silence and proud of himself when his victims broke and came clean, whether they’d done what he suspected of them or not. Now the silence hurts, and the pained, almost inaudible gasps hurt worse, and he still doesn’t know why he’s doing it.  _ What the fuck am I doing? _

Caleb’s eyes burn, which seems a disingenuous thought considering how Nott must be feeling. She stays still, except that after a half dozen blows, she begins to twitch, and after a dozen, the effort it takes to overcome the reflexive need to get away from the pain becomes a tremble in her limbs.

Caleb has been crying a while before he hears nott sob, on a sharp inhale that follows another smack to her thighs. He hits her again, because that had never meant his work was over before, except he realises as she jerks in his lap that there is no natural end point to this. He isn’t waiting on a confession. He’s trying to get a feeling out of her, not some piece of information.

“When do I stop?” He asks, wishing his voice didn’t sound so wet. 

Nott shakes her head slightly, not looking up at him. Her ass is a mess of dark green and purple, the skin puffy and swollen. She shakes off the trembling during her reprieve and manages to lie still again 

“I don’t know what that means,” he tells her, putting the massager down on the side. This time it doesn’t fall. He touches her burning hot skin, feeling ridges where the edge of the brush had caught her flesh especially hard, damp from sweat and steam. “I don’t like this.”

Nott nods, and begins to rise, awkwardly supporting herself with her hands and pulling up her knees to perch on his lap out of the water. Her hips and breasts and shoulders have marks pressed into them from lying against his damp clothes. He draws his knees together to not leave her hanging over a gap, and she resettles herself facing him, her beaten behind sitting on his knees and her legs spread on either side, feet resting on the stone next to him.

He stares at her like he’s never seen another person before. Nott’s face is splotchy, like she’d been crying harder than he’d realised, and masking it better. She meets his gaze for a second, and then looks back down at his chest instead. She’s dripping wet, literally, her juices thinned by lingering water from the tub and dripping slowly between her legs and onto Caleb’s thigh. He inhales sharply at the sight, and he can smell her arousal when he does so. He’s smelled it before, but usually through her clothes, not so close, not... not naked in his lap with her legs spread, her pubic hair slick and the folds of her spread wide, one of his hands on her waist to stop her falling and the other on her knee.

He has no idea what that means, for what just happened or for Nott and he in general. There isn’t room in his mind to compute it, or even to process whether he too might be aroused. Perhaps it’s just some mechanical thing. Or a fetish. Or perhaps it was the closeness and the nudity and a whole lot of endorphins and hormones. Or maybe it’s Caleb.

Her cheeks are as dark as her ass. Caleb’s own face goes from cold to hot, the warmth literally creeping up his neck and cheeks and ears, accompanied by an odd tingling throughout his entire body. Numbness. He could be standing next to himself right now.

Nott covers her face with both hands and tilts forward until her head bumps his shoulder. He can feel her trembling, and he pulls her close, wrapping his arms around her back and tucking his head down on top of hers.

“You’re disappointed,” she whispers, her voice cracking and rough as though she’d shouted and screamed with every blow.

Caleb doesn’t know what to say, because he is. He’d been shocked to find out how disappointed he was. But he doesn’t want her to feel any more shame, knows the feeling all too well. And he doesn’t want to lie to her, so he doesn’t. “You wouldn’t have actually done it.”

“I might have,” she says, and means it. 

Caleb shakes his head. “You would not have done it, because we would not have let you. That is what friends are for.”

“To take you down when you decide to turn evil.” She says, with none of her usual irony.

“To stop you from making bad decisions.” His hand glides down until he can feel the burned skin again. “To help you be...”

“Good?” She asks. There’s a hint of derisive humour underneath the quaver of her voice that hadn’t been there when they first met. “I’m not a good person, Caleb.”

“You’re misplacing that comma again,” he says, willing himself to believe it. He’s not a good person either. He can feel a welt beneath his finger, and rubs at it.

Nott doesn’t react to his hand. She leans back to look up at him seriously, like she’d done when she was the one giving him a talk, and not the other way around. “I’m  _ not_, Caleb... I didn’t mean what I said before, about you being one book away from taking over the world, because you aren’t. You _have_ become a better person. You want good things for strangers, you care about people you aren’t even responsible for. But you were _always_ destined for great things, looking at the bigger picture. I’m just... I can only care about people I’ve met, and that I know about.”

Caleb shakes his head, but even though she’s wrong, about him being a better person, it makes sense to him that this would be the case. “Well. I’m not a good person, and I’m very selfish, although I will not argue that I am better than I was. But, you have to understand that there are ordinary people, thousands of ordinary people, like your family, like Kiri, and all those ordinary people we’ve met who don’t deserve pain?”

“I understand it,” she chews the skin on the side of her thumb, ragged from contact with her conical teeth. “But... I don’t feel it. If I know a name or a face, or... anything about a person. It’s like, they’re real. But if you just say _thousands of people_? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“They are like ants to you?” Caleb bites down on a pang of disgust as he says it. The words taste like the ones he had once parroted in his youth. He looks at Nott’s shoulder to avoid her face.

“ _I’m_ the ant,” Nott leans sideways to catch his eye and looks at him beseechingly. He understands that she wants his forgiveness, his understanding. “I’m too small to affect them, and they’re too big to matter to me.”

“But that isn’t true. You do affect them, and it would matter very much.” He stares into her eyes. He still has no idea if she’ll ask him to change her tomorrow, and that thought curls darkly within him, that this might be the last time he looks into them truly, having this conversation, after what she’d almost done, and what he just did.

“It  used to be true. Once upon a time, I went missing, along with my husband and son and half the people we knew, and nobody came for us at all. Nobody cared, no one was even affected. And nothing I could have done as Veth could ever impact anyone else. I had trouble even making my own family care about me, until Yeza.” She shrinks. She’s always been small, but maybe Caleb hadn’t realised how tiny. Her ears have been drooping for the whole conversation, but they’re flat to the side of her head now, and she looks up at him through her damp hair, and yes, he can see it. A problem of scale.

“Why were you lying in the water like that?”

She closes her eyes for a moment. “I was - nothing, really...” She tries to wait him out, but he can be more patient than she can. “I was trying to think about... the last time I was in my body. How it felt. But all I could really recall was what it was like to be under the water, and have it all around. So I was trying to... I thought if I could just replicate it, I might be able to sort of imagine what it was like without the water part. I don’t know... it seems stupid now.”

“Did it work?”

“A little bit.” Her eyes reopen wet, but she blinks the tears away. “The easiest feelings for me to remember are always the ones from right at the end, when I knew I was going to die and no one was coming.”

“You,” he cups her face in one hand and lifts her gently, straightening out her spine until her eyes are level with his chin. “Are not insignificant. You are Veth, and I am sorry no one came to save you, Nott, I really am, but you are what Veth became. Maybe people couldn’t see it before, but we all know that you are very important.”

“To my friends, I am,” Nott admits. Caleb can see her affection for a moment, and then her doubt, her fear. “But when I go back... to being Veth, no stranger is ever gonna look at me twice again.”

“I was a stranger to you once,” Caleb murmurs, bending down until their foreheads touch, rubbing his thumb against her cheek. He squeezes the bruised skin in his other hand. His fingertips slide against something slippery, and Nott gasps sharply.

“Sorry, sorry!” He jerks his hand back, but there’s no way to get away from her as she sits on him without shoving her into the water, and she has one hand on his shoulder and the other fisted in the fabric of his shirt. “I’m sorry. Ah - we - I -“

“It’s okay,” she lies, using his shoulder to haul herself to her feet. It brings her body in very close to his for a moment, her breasts at his eye level, her engorged sex brushing his chest before she steps off to the side.

He watches her find a towel, not wanting to move in case his own body finds the rubbing of his wet clothes too titillating. Now some time has passed since he had - his mind trips over the words  _ beaten her _ \- now that some time has passed, there are bruises from her mid-thigh up. Not deep, black bruises, like he’d sometimes seen on her after a fight, but certainly enough to have been extremely painful. Two streaks catch the light where moments ago, his fingers had smeared her juices over her bruised ass.

He shouldn’t have looked.

The rooms and his clothes and his fingers smell of her.

She turns back around, wrapping herself in her towel, and see him staring.

“I’m sorry,” she says, like she thinks she’d used him for something.

“It’s okay,” he replies automatically. “I’m sorry. I...”

 _I don’t know how it happened. I didn’t mean to do it? You hit me first? I didn’t think I would do that to you._ So many excuses and platitudes, all jumbled together in his mind, a lot of them simply bullshit and many too sickening to ever voice.  _ I was angry. You deserved it. You needed it. I am a disgusting person and I hurt you because I was angry and I could. _

Nott comes back over and stands beside him, hugging herself through the towel. She doesn’t seem to be wallowing in thoughts of how disgusting Caleb is, though, because when she speaks it’s nothing to do with him. “I don’t want to be Veth again.”

Caleb’s inner monologue stops working. “What?”

Nott shrugs. “I mean, I want my body back, of course. But I don’t want my life. I don’t want to be insignificant. I don’t want to be... a housewife.”

“...You have a husband,” Caleb says after a moment.

“I know.”

“You have a  son .”

“I  _know_. ”

“You don’t want them?” Caleb knows this isn’t true.

“I do want them. But, I don’t _only_ want them. They’re all I had, before...” She hovers beside him, thinking and chewing her fingers. “They used to be enough, but I don’t think that’s true, anymore.”

Caleb tries to hide his sigh. “You feel guilty?”

She shrugs and sucks a spot of blood coming out around her nail. He’d take her hand and ask her to stop, but it would feel too hypocritical. “They’re supposed to be enough.”

“What would be enough?” He asks. The question seems much more serious once he’s said it, and he can feel that anxious pull in his chest. 

“I don’t think I know,” she says softly. Her eyes flick over to Caleb. “But I’m hungry for it.”

Caleb takes a shuddering breath. He can still smell a little of that hunger, lingering in the humidity of the room, as she turns away and goes upstairs, turning invisible midway. 

He stays still, thighs squeezing shut on any attempt his body might make to communicate his own feelings towards him, until he trusts himself enough to follow her. 


End file.
